


A True Story

by salamanderinspace



Category: Original Work
Genre: Drug Use, Memoirs, Narcotics, Other, Philosophy, Recreational Drug Use, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 04:31:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11982171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salamanderinspace/pseuds/salamanderinspace
Summary: A personal story about opiate abuse during the era of "opiate crisis."





	A True Story

It starts with Malachi. Malachi had brown hair, brown eyes, and freckles. When he was 15 and I was 16, Malachi invited me to go hiking in Sherburne on his uncle's land. We did not know each other. He knew me only by reputation. "It'd be so fun to hang out!" he kept telling me. "You seem like such a wild person!"

It was very uncharacteristic of my parents to allow me to just go off with someone they didn't know to a place they hadn't been. Perhaps they needed some time alone. Perhaps they did know Malachi's mother. I know she and Malachi would come in to the library sometimes and check out romance novels. My mother was the library director, then, and I worked there after school. 

Perhaps it mattered to my mother that Malachi was gay in a way he couldn't hide if he wanted to. Maybe she thought that made him "safer." Whatever the reason, I was allowed to go on an out-of-town trip with a total stranger. This was unheard of.

I don't remember how I got to Sherburne, only that it was early morning when we arrived. The house was a real log cabin with exposed rafters. Right away, Malachi's uncle went off to do something (drink?) and left us alone.

That's when we pooled our pills.

I'd been interested in Vicodin ever since my mother encouraged me to "experiment" with one when I was 12. I was not allowed to develop an addiction, but the painkillers were certainly my favorite, at that moment in time. I had six on me, and some muscle relaxers; Malachi had a lot more. He just kept giving me pills, entirely for free. I cheeked a few and took a few.

Opiates, including the more intense varieties, affect me in a particular way. Sometimes they don't do anything but make me very nauseous. Sometimes, however, they overturn me with a warmth that radiates through me and lifts me into the air. They make me strong. They fill my eyes with a clear, blazing light. I have, at this more advanced year, worked out what differentiates between the bad and the good experience of opiates--it's quite peculiar. Can you guess? Well, I have a good time on vicodin, but only if I was already in pain when I took it.

Isn't that funny? A drug that, when "abused," does exactly what it is meant to do?

The catch, of course, is that I often don't know when I'm in pain.

This is probably a very mysterious statement to people who have not experienced severe, chronic pain. The fact is, however, the nervous system has certain ways of propelling a person onward in their life and activities, even when they are crippled very profoundly. I've heard words like "dissociation" and "displacement." For me it's very much like control--being in control of my feelings, and choosing therefore to address new problems and assaults rather than break down and scream and wallow. Or pacify. You simply do not give yourself time. You know? If there is simply no time to feel pain, it curls into a ball inside you and waits.

So. Sometimes that ball of pain becomes unknowable or obfuscated and, on these occasions, opiates are magnificent. They unwind a tension I didn't know I was carrying. It's like lifting a thousand pounds of weight I simply didn't know was on my shoulders. 

Pain reorders your priorities. I think of Richard III, or Captain Ahab and his peg leg. Pain gives you drive and focus to attack what hurt you. Even when it is invisible, pain does this. After taking three or four Vicodin at Malachi's uncle's place in Sherburne, I suddenly realized that all of my goals were not especially important. That I'd been a passenger of my pain. Things that had been very important and that mattered very much suddenly did not matter at all.

If I recall, the first thing we did was go for a walk. Malachi mentioned that he thought there was an old stone quarry up the road. Finding it felt like we had Discovered It. It was majestic, with massive sheets of rock in every array, and long beds of gravel winding in paths through various brush. I had the idea to build a campfire. We did this, despite it being 11am on a warm spring (summer?) day. I think I remember finding a trinket of some kind in the dirt. It was as if we were the first people in the world. The only people who mattered.

When the fire went out we returned to the house and had a small lunch. I think Malachi took a nap. I took a few more pills. Shortly after this, the uncle returned and asked if we wanted to go for a ride in his jalopy. This was an old-fashioned style carriage car, the sort which is sometimes called a "dune buggy." Malachi mentioned that if we rode on the back, we might get high from the engine fumes. We tried it. If I recall I made no particular effort to breathe said fumes. Still I have pristine memories of bouncing along on the open-back of this antique car, going over hills and around the woods, shrieking with adolescent glee and wild rapture.

Time kept passing faster and slower. I think it was about five or six when we got back to the house. My parents were waiting. They'd come to pick me up. I took two more Vicodin before getting in the car with them. The total for the day, if I recall, was about eight. Somehow my memory skips next to a scene after nightfall, when I'm riding in their car with the distinct sensation of everything sparkling.

There are a couple conclusions which, I hope, prevent this from being another generic "one time, I got so high!" story. The first is this: I never saw or spoke to Malachi again. He just disappeared for a while, and shortly after that I moved to the city and began my adult life. For one day only, it seemed, we'd been friends and allies in the deepest way possible; then we returned to the world as strangers. Also, and perhaps just as significantly, I never successfully got high on opiates again. I haven't often tried. It would make sense for me to have them, since--due to a chronic joint condition--I'm in pretty severe and disabling chronic pain. But I don't bother.

This brings me to my point of consideration. I've heard friends recount how drugs, and particularly hallucinogens, put them in contact with a higher plane of reality. I think it is Vicodin that changed my relationship with reality. Objects are not as solid for me as they are for others. If I smash myself into a wall, the amount of pain I feel is closer to my regular experience than the amount of pain most other persons would feel. And I'm in pain all the time. It colors everything. It shapes my whole experience. When I see things, I see them through the lens of the twinge in my stomach that is hurt. That pain, whether or not I am consciously aware of it, is my truth. Other people do not and cannot experience it, understand it, relate to it. I'm generally on the fence about whether I need them to. There's no words to bring people into this. I can't describe my pain to you. If I wanted you to understand, I'd have to hurt you.

When I remember that day in Sherburne I remember feeling intensely connected to Malachi and to the world. I believed that there was a place in the world for me and I had found it--and also that I could carry it with me. I remember feeling confident, like everything was going to be fine. It wasn't so much a sense that nothing COULD hurt as that the hurt was not the most important factor to consider in making decisions. When I wasn't minimizing and managing pain, I was looking at the world around me with openness. I could see and feel the same things as other people. I could be one of them. I could be one with them.

What does it mean to be detached from the common reality? What IS the common reality? Is there one? I wonder if it is more or less like what I experienced on opiates. I think most people understand that some of what we perceive is physical and internal and some connects to something external. When our sense of what's external matches the sense others have of what's external, that's supposedly where truth lives.

So when I ask myself, "should I fall into a narcotics habit?" part of me is asking how best to get to truth. What is truth? Is it where everyone else is? Or is it where I am? And how dangerous could it really be for us to meet in the middle?


End file.
